Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday July 16, 2010 @09:31AM
from the magic-glasses dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. This so-called 'TeraPixel' sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft's latest HPC and parallel software assets. Quoting: 'Compared to the old sky image, the TeraPixel version is much more refined. With all the artifacts, seams and inconsistencies processed away, it looks like a true unified image of the sky above. It's like going from Super Mario Brothers on 1985-era Nintendo consoles to Halo 2 on Xbox 360s.'" You can view the image at Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope site — it requires the Silverlight plugin for Windows or Mac. No word at the site about Linux or whether Moonlight works there.

It's like going from gaming on Windows 1.0 in 1985 to 1985-era Nintendo consoles

Or what about

It's like going from a red ring of death on an XBox console to Gran Turismo 3 on a Playstation 2

Oh and I also enjoy that you used your Space Act Agreement with NASA to "make planetary images and data available via the Internet to the public" and also promote the download and installation of silvercrap. Can't do something for the public without advertising and pushing proprietary software on people, can we? I hope Google gets the chance to do this with HTML5.

So this looks like a really cool thing that MS did, so I'm going to wait in wide eyed anticipation at how the slashdot community is going to trash it because it's from Microsoft and not Google (or at least be more overly critical of it). I do hope I'm wrong though.

You at least give a viable reason for disliking Silverlight. Most of the commenters just seem to hate it because it's Silverlight. Why they don't make a Linux version of it is beyond me, they really ought to.

Now to play devil's advocate: I don't see why Silverlight garners so much more hate than Flash around here. Both are pushed using the same tactics and neither is really open. Flash has just been around longer.

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

This is one of the handful of things that Silverlight does really well.

Because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if this project was less a "We've got this cool thing, what Microsoft technology can we push with it?" and more "What's a thing we could do that would really show off a strength of Silverlight?"

With the resources of Google. Pretend your the engineer tasked with making this. "Hey, boss, we can spend 3x the time writing in in Javascript so its compatible with all browsers or use our inhouse Silverlight tech to get it done faster. What should we do?"

Of course, they didn't have this conversation. It went: "build this in silverlight and let me know when its done."

Except, now that the idea of doing it in Javascipt is out, anyone can figure it out. The math's simple. The database is easy to set up. Any undergrad CS major should be able to cobblestone it together as a project within a week or two.

Now setting it up to make sure it can handle a/. DDOS may be another matter...

To deliver 800 GB worth of stitched-together composite images to users in a fashion that doesn’t result in them dying of old age before they can identify and zoom in on a portion worth seeing up-close?

From “arrow, ctrl, +, and - keys”, I get the impression he thinks you just give them a massive JPEG and let their browser handle the panning and zooming rather than using “extra software” such as a Javascript app or a Silverlight or Flash object.

Essentially, yeah -- this kind of zooming is a built-in function of Silverlight. They call it Deep Zoom and here's [microsoft.com] a bit of an article about it with some code/markup examples linked if you're curious.

Here's [hardrock.com] another interesting example of the concept in action -- obviously you'd need Silverlight or Moonlight to view it.

None of this is anything you couldn't do with another technology -- it's just that Silverlight makes it fast/easy to throw toget

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

I'm just not sure it's true. ImageScope provides a workable flash interface to allow you to view 10,000 MPixel images just fine. It's not all that hard whatever you're writing it in. Pyramid tiled images make writing a front end pretty easy to be honest. I think the good work they've done is the image processing at the back end to get this data into nice shape in the first place.

Playing devil's advocate -- it's pretty trivial to make a Silverlight interface to pan and zoom around a giant image like this. It's less trivial to do the same thing with, say, JavaScript or Flash.

Actually you're trolling more than playing devil's advocate. There's a sh*tload of zoom & pan-enabled image viewing libraries, both in JS and Flash, all using tiles just like Silverlight -- try to google some.

And for that matter it's trivial to DIY from scratch using canvas, which of course IE conveniently doesn't support, but that problem was solved too long ago. OpenLayers [openlayers.org], which you might have seen at work at OpenStreetMap [openstreetmap.org], includes a VML rendering backend, besides canvas and SVG.

Except that Silverlight is probably _why_ they did it in the first place. Flash and standardized HTML5 are threats to Windows and without Windows Microsoft is history so Silverlight is the hammer, the night sky is but one nail. Is there an iPhone or Android app for that? I didn't think so but you can bet that when they ship the next new Microsoft phone software, they'll release one for it.

20 years of watching these people operate points me to these kinds of conclusions.

I see already the bashing because they don't support competitor platforms. I guess that's fair enough, but - can I get Google's Sky Maps on my non-Android phone (Symbian)? Or where are the calls to run on Linux phones there, such as Maemo? Everytime we get a "For the Iphone" app, do we get versions for other platforms (even when they're not written by Apple)?

And at least MS can say they're writing something that's supported by 90+% of the market, which obviously doesn't apply for Iphones or Android, and the

Most applications cannot run cross-OS, but the web is supposed to be os neutral. In many cases a program can be made to work with multiple OSs but there's no way a program can run on everything. The web

So this looks like a really cool thing that MS did, so I'm going to wait in wide eyed anticipation at how the slashdot community is going to trash it because it's from Microsoft and not Google (or at least be more overly critical of it). I do hope I'm wrong though.

Hope, huh? Niiice, juuuiiiicy!
Speaking of my hopes, I had hoped for years to see a better OS from MS, and more fair play towards FOSS (and I must admit that MS mimicked them quite swell lately). The coolness of the sky (seen in silverlight) doesn't bring me any benefits, thus the efficiency of this coolness... well... is sooo cool is that's close to 0K. (how's that for a trashing:) ).

To be fair: I'm equally happy I'm living in a "year of Linux on desktop" for quite a some years - looks like a "perpetual

The fundamental problem is this: users are still stupid, so we can't get past The September that Never Ended. [wikipedia.org]. If we can do that, we can get past the "always Winter and never Christmas" [examiner.com] phase, and geeks can cry out "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of [Helsinki]!"

I'm very happy that they've helped make something like a better image of the sky available. What I don't like is Microsoft's habit of taking something like that and packaging it up in bullshit proprietary formats that you can only access if you abuse their shit software. Yeah, I think I got that right. I don't like Microsoft's software, I don't like their business tactics, and I don't like their insistence that everyone use their software. I'll use their software when I think it's right for the job. Right n

Um, they didn't give the TCP/IP stack away, they borrowed it from BSD. In other words, they gave away something that they had been given and which other people could've easily gotten from the original source. I'm not really sure why MS should get any sort of credit for that.

I agree this is really awesome. Microsoft has done some revolutionary things in the past, like giving away the TCP/IP stack Internet Explorer 4.0 for free

If "giving away" a TCP/IP stack is your idea of revolutionary, I'd like to point out that (A) TCP/IP stacks have an integral part of every workstation-class operation system since the early 1980s and (B) you're not giving Microsoft enough credit (at least sufficiently early credit), since TCP/IP for Windows for Workgroups (3.11) came out in mid-1994, coi

Replying to undo my original Troll mod, because I feel that that may have been a bit harsh.* Internet Explorer is a browser, not a TCP/IP stack.* There were several stacks before, but Winsock was the first common stack for windows. It predates IE4 by two years, and is not the work of Microsoft.* MS should have implemented proper networking from the get-go, and arguably already in their DOS offerings, instead of peddling their proprietary crap on top of what they always, and short-sightedly, looked at as jus

Since you are not yet marked as troll, and play is still suspended at The Open, I'll waste a few characters on your post.

Microsoft has done some revolutionary things in the past, like giving away the TCP/IP stack Internet Explorer 4.0 for free when these products were very expensive and would have hampered the growth of Internet

MSIEv3 was such a gigantic piece of refuse that Netscape dominated the market and all were quite happy with that. MSIEv4 was sufficiently acceptable and insidiously integrated/prom

Bud Light, the very worst example of American beer, the very worst in the world ever

Clearly you've never had the displeasure of drinking Natty Ice (Natural Light Ice) or Beast Ice (Milwaukee's Best Ice). Actually Beast in general is just awful but both of those will make Bud Light seem like beer of the gods.

You need to put quotes around "american" as well as "beer"; AB is now owned by Europeans (and see another poster's comment). [slashdot.org]

Actually, my favorite beer is Killian's, my favorite American beer is Sam Adams. Sadly, in most bars here you're stuck with AB and Miller products, and in the rest of them you pay twice as much for imports as you do for "domestics", and more for "american" beers as you do in the dives I drink at, which have a more interesting clientelle [slashdot.org] anyway.

The problem is, if you're running Windows, uninstalling something sometimes doesn't completely uninstall it (unlike Linux, on which Silverlight won't run but when you uninstall something it's gone; I don't know about Mac but I would guess that they're not like MS, nobody is). And I'm not going to run Ghost just to use Silverlight, which AFAIK isn't used by anyone but MS. Hell, Flash is bad enough, I don't need two of them.

Exactly, its so boring, been done, throwing cpu time at a project just feels very dull propaganda.
"look we have big boxes now and they are powerful..."
Thinking back to the Simpsons AABF02
No, no. To attract the top grads, we'll need to host a
computing stunt. A picture that showcases our cutting-
edge technology.
A "sky map", sir?
[gasps] Yes, brilliant! That's just the kind of far-out
gimmick we need.

They must have been using Vista Explorer pre SP-1 to do the file copy.

Hmm? Transferring 802 GB over a 1 Gbps link is going to take 1.78 hours as a bare minimum and assuming you lose some time on the overhead and don’t necessarily have 100% of the network’s bandwidth available to you the whole time, 2.5 hours doesn’t seem terribly long.

There's still some artifacts left though, have a look near (seriously overexposed) Sirius for a ghost of the telescope pupil (the thing that looks like an alien solar sail) (Constellations -> Canis Major)

Please select your response from the following/.-approved categories (check all that apply):

This project sucks because...
[ ] Microsoft is evil
[ ] They totally stole this idea from
[ ] They've never done ANYTHING original or noteworthy
[ ] EVERYTHING they do is about hurting consumers
[ ] did this 100 times better 10 years ago
[ ] Microsoft killed my family and made me watch

Can we cover the outside of commercial airliners with cheap cameras, use computers to stitch the panoramas together, and then give passengers a zoomable, pannable picture of the sky and ground to look at?

In their hearts I think most anti-MS people on slashdot already acknowledge the fact that they've been out-eviled recently. The day of MS as the root of all IT nastiness has come and gone. They just need to say it out loud.

Please make sure you only buy products labled "Rolls for Sure(TM)" to avoid compatibility issues. That way when we abandon "Rolls For Sure" after a year, you know without a doubt you will need to rebuy all of your previous wheels.

My initial reaction to seeing mention of silverlight was "well damn..." If I were running Windows, I still would not install silverlight. So now I am here seeking to find if anyone has ripped the data accessible through silverlight and converted it or made it available in some other way.

If I need to see the sky, I open my eyes, diet for 2 years so I'm light enough to stand, have a bath to clean off the years of accumulated feces, sweat, filth and dead skin that have accumulated on my body, scrape the grime off the window of my mom's basement only to realise it's been boarded up, try to open the door only to realise it's locked, email the cops to get them to unlock my mom's basement, receive no response, manage to break down the door using improvised explosives fashioned out of dried feces and cleaning products, find out that sometime in the last decade my mom's house has been abducted by aliens and the being now feeding me through the laundry chute is actually a robotic maid, open the door and realise I'm flying through space, but the view is way more awesome than this M$ shit!

yeah, it's certainly not for use in science / research / serious stuff. It's possible that's the thing is so stupid big that there isn't a good way to view the data. But without access to the actual images, it's an "ooo neato" click-through type deal.

Would be neat to map the image onto a room floorplan and print the image out on a plotter as wallpaper. Or somehow import the image into kstars?